


hero worship

by galamiel



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-26
Updated: 2015-03-26
Packaged: 2018-03-19 17:18:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3617910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galamiel/pseuds/galamiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>he’s three-quarters in love with her and breathes her words like oxygen and lives for her shadow passing over him</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He thought she was a human male the first time he heard about her, and even continued believing so after he first saw her.

She wore bulky heavy armor that made her shoulders look broader--practical armor that didn’t have separate cups for her breasts and instead gave her the wide, flat chest that human males had in their armor. The hefty shoulderplates gave her the illusion of narrow hips, rather than the curved ones that human females usually seemed to have.

If he hadn’t had so much experience with humans from C-Sec, he might’ve continued believing she was a male after she removed her helmet. She had a strong jaw and heavy, dark brows, her nose strong and straight, dark hair cropped short. Most human females tended to have longer hair, softer facial features. Ultimately, it was the lack of facial hair and the higher, more melodic voice that gave her away.

Looking back, Garrus almost can’t believe he had thought she was a man. There’s no way that any man, human or otherwise, could keep pace with Commander Shepard. If this is the bar that humans set for their women, then, well, he honestly isn’t surprised that humans are already worming their way into galactic politics.

He thinks he’s half in love with her after the first few weeks. He knows Alenko is completely head over heels for her, knows T’Soni’s interest in her is more than purely that of a scientist, wonders if they’re drowning in her words for the same reasons. Shepard’s the kind of woman whose gravity pulls everyone around her into orbit, the kind of woman who makes people want to fall in love with her, want to place her on a pedestal and worship her. She doesn’t do this on purpose, he knows. Very few people would choose to affect others in this way. It tends to lead to a lonely existence.

Garrus finds himself telling her about Dr. Saleon, stumbling over his words in anger, tells her about the poor employees that the salarian doctor used as test subjects. She doesn’t interrupt, stands there with her arms crossed against her chest, listening, dark eyes carefully regarding him.

“He goes by Dr. Heart now,” he tells her, spitting out the name contemptuously. “I--” he swallows, blue eyes flicking over to meet hers for the first time in the conversation. “I have the transponder codes for the ship.”

Shepard considers his words carefully, exhales through her nose. “Alright,” she says. “Let’s go pay this asshole a visit.”

She doesn’t let him kill Saleon. The salarian dies anyways, when he tries to run, and Garrus breaks free from her pull for the first time, thrusts his head above water and sees her clearly, questions her.

“What was the point of that?” he asks, limbs tense, talons clenched tightly around his weapon. Anger fills his body and he’s aware, for the first time, just how much larger he is than Shepard. He’s always considered her to be about the same size as a human male, but she’s not. Even in her armor she’s small and he towers over her. It’s the magnitude of her presence that makes her seem bigger than she is, and it’s only because of the anger rushing through him that he’s come to this realization.

Shepard’s quiet for a long time, and it irritates him further. His nose ridges flare, mandibles snap tight to his jaw. She looks so weak and helpless, just like any other human, standing there staring at Saleon’s body, and he wants to grab her and shake her, force her to speak.

As if on cue, she opens her mouth.

“You can’t control how people will act, Garrus,” she says, in that slow, measured voice. “But you can control how you will respond to the situation and, in the end, that’s what really matters.”

He doesn’t understand then, not fully, not completely. He feels like he’s deflating as the anger rushes from his body, like Shepard pricked him with a pin and let out all the air. His mandibles flutter - he feels a little dizzy, like he’s gone without oxygen for too long, breathes in deeply. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you, Commander,” he says slowly. And it’s true.

She smiles a little, one side of her mouth quirking up. “I’m nothing special, Vakarian,” she replies, clapping him on the shoulder. She glances back at the dead doctor. “I think we’re done here.”

He feels himself slipping back under her waves and doesn’t try to stop himself from drowning, fills his lungs with her words and follows her back to the Normandy.

She’s big again, tall and imposing, strong and graceful and beautiful (and how hilarious it is to think of her, a human, that way, but he’s three-quarters in love with her and breathes her words like oxygen and lives for her shadow passing over him, and he’s convinced she’s the most radiant creature he’s ever set eyes on, almost forgets he thought she was a man the first time he saw her.)

Alenko kisses her outside her cabin, in the shadows where no one would think to look, except Garrus does, and sees Shepard almost kiss Alenko back, but she doesn’t. Those dark eyes flick over the lieutenant’s broad shoulders, take in the room, settle on Garrus, and she lays her small hands (when did they get so small? they were large enough to handle a shotgun with ease) on Alenko’s chest, gently pushes him away with a murmured word. Alenko’s flustered, blushes, his cheeks and the tips of his ears going pink, mumbles something about work and walks off.

Shepard turns and enters her quarters without glancing at him or Alenko’s retreating figure.

She’s a goddess on Virmire, silver tongue entrancing Kirrahe and his salarians, careful words pulling Wrex back under her spell with ease. The krogan rebellions might’ve never happened if there had been a Shepard back then--a raging krogan is nothing against the human woman, towering and unyielding under pressure, breathing insinuations with that gentle voice. Perhaps it’s better that Shepard was only here now, better that she was only human. There’s no doubt in his mind that, if she was a crueler person or even if she had the lifespan of an asari, she could have the entire galaxy eating out of her palm.

She lives for her work, though--bleeds Alliance blue. She has no inclination to claim the galaxy.

Everything goes as smoothly as it can, all things considered. They systematically take out the geth and Saren’s defenses, release the mindless salarian prisoners, speak with the asari scientist (and let her go, of course Shepard lets her go. Wrex grumbles and Garrus silently agrees with the krogan, but Shepard’s raised eyebrows and calm stare are another eddy pulling them down into her depths) and are confronted with Sovereign, but then there are two problems, two people she needs to save, and there is only one Normandy, only one Shepard.

Shepard goes for Ashley and the salarians and Garrus is on her six the entire time, just like he always is. Saren’s there and Garrus half expects the rogue spectre to drown in Shepard’s words as well, but he doesn’t. Shepard is rattled and flushed (how he’d wanted to see her face red like this, back when she’d almost kissed Alenko, but now his stomach twists as he witnesses it), hair flyway and helmet abandoned sometime during the run from the bomb. She’s screaming herself hoarse at Saren, practically begging him, no, she is begging him, to stop, to join her.

Garrus wonders if this is the first time her eloquence has failed her so spectacularly. If her words are an ocean then Saren is a leviathan, a sea monster ruling her depths. She pummels him with hurricanes and he is unswept by her tempests.

Or perhaps he is already caught in a whirlpool and Shepard’s net isn’t strong enough to pull him out.

And then, somehow, they’re fighting, and Shepard’s knocked flat on the ground, and Saren’s talons are clenched around her throat, picking her up and holding her out over the edge of the tower and Garrus can’t find it in him to move, to help her, but neither can Wrex or Ashley or Kirrahe. She’s clawing at the rogue spectre’s hand and it’s only the klaxon of an alarm that distracts him enough for her to slug him in the face.

She’s powerful and radiant and transcendent again for all of half a second before she collapses to her knees, gasping for breath as Saren escapes, hands shaking too badly for her to do more than level her pistol in his general direction

They leave Alenko behind on Virmire and Shepard’s so quiet that Garrus wants to scream at her didn’t he mean something to you? but he doesn’t know how, doesn’t know what to say (what can you say to a deity brought to her knees? he doesn’t think that there are words enough to assuage her.)

She chose Ash over Alenko, never looking back towards the bomb site. He was at her back the whole time, though, could hear the pain in her voice as she fought Saren, saved Ash and Kirrahe and his men, saw her stare at Virmire as the Normandy flew them out of there, saw her stagger off to her quarters and emerge smooth and composed over an hour later, wondered if Kaidan was, just maybe, really nothing more than a squad member to her.

He finds himself treading water now, surfaced and breathing air, seeing her with unclouded eyes. He can see the cracks in her armor, the nervous swallows and the way she stumbles over words sometimes, tongue not nearly quite as fluid as it had been before Virmire. Shepard runs herself ragged chasing after Saren, shrugs off anyone who attempts to help her, politely responds to sympathies with “thank you, but I’m okay”, declines T’Soni’s ardent attention, goes on acting like nothing ever happened, like Alenko never died, but she avoids his station outside her quarters all the same.

She drives the mako through the relay on Ilos and he’s there next to her, clutching at the seat as she mercilessly plows down geth and Wrex laughs behind them, using the mako’s cannon to shoot down anything that moves.

This time she’s ready for Saren, stands her ground as he tries to excuse and validate his actions, and this time her tide washes in over him, the waves that have engulfed her entire crew twine around his legs, pull him under. Saren’s hers now and hers alone as he presses the barrel of his gun to his head and takes his own life.

It will be years before Garrus fully understands what indoctrination is, years before he comes to the shocking realization that, somehow, the words tumbling from Shepard’s lips were stronger than the reapers’.

It will be years before he thinks that it shouldn’t have surprised him at all.

Saren’s dead and he’s going to go back to C-Sec, he can feel the sand under his feet, feels himself trudging out of the water and back up onto the beach, exoskeleton gleaming wetly, shining and clean, from her influence, her words still dripping like droplets of water from his body.

He turns back to look at her ocean for the last time, sees the storm out of the corner of his eye as it swallows him up and pulls him down.

Shepard is dead.

He thinks he’s dead, too.


	2. Chapter 2

If there’s any place in the entire galaxy that could benefit from her words, it’s Omega. An infected wound, Omega’s on the verge of death every day, though whether from the merc gangs that rule the streets or from the filth and plagues that sweep through the asteroid has yet to be decided.

Her ghost, her (he laughs at his own joke), her specter, regards him as he boards the transport. Her fingers clutch at the fabric of his sleeve and he can almost feel it, but he knows she’s not there, not really.

She’s dead. Been dead for some months.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks him, water spilling from her lips, a waterfall that stops only when she closes her mouth.

There’s no water on the floor but he thinks his shoes squeak, wetly, as he moves to take his seat.

He woke up to the smell of her some days earlier, to a weight on the other side of his bed, reached for his handgun only to find a dead woman haunting him, staring at him, water bubbling from her blue lips every time she spoke to him in that calm voice of hers.

It’s a rehashing of every word she ever said to him in those few months he spent clinging to her coattails, spoken in different orders and organized into different sentences, but her ghost doesn’t say a word he’s never heard her mumble before.

He’d come to the conclusion that she was haunting him because he wasn’t living up to her legacy, wasn’t stepping into the shoes that she left behind for someone to fill. He wasn’t a human, wasn’t a woman, wasn’t a spectre, but there sure as hell wasn’t any reason that he couldn’t clean up the scum that lurked in the corners of the galaxy like she had. It’s how you respond to the situation that really matters, after all.

So he resigns from C-Sec (and how he enjoys that look of shock on Pallin’s face), packs his bags, and gets on the first flight to the Terminus Systems.

The first flight to Omega.

“It’s what you would have wanted,” Garrus replies under his breath, and a few other passengers turn, convinced he’s talking to them. He’s not. He’s talking to the air, to the ghost they can’t see. He sees the fleeting disgusted looks on their faces (there’s something wrong with that turian) as they turn away again, intent on ignoring him for the rest of the trip. He’s fine with that. He wouldn’t have spoken to them anyways.

“Is it?” the ghost asks, but she’s not questioning him. The look on her face is vaguely introspective, something that’s more than a little unsettling coming from a hallucination. He hums out a note and it seems to satisfy the specter. He settles into his seat and she perches on the edge of the one next to him, quiet now, and he can almost pretend that he can’t see her.

 

“Did I ever tell you about growing up on Earth?” the ghost is saying and he ignores her just as he always does now, stalks down the streets with his weapons concealed. Not that anyone thinks for half a second that he doesn’t have any - turian wearing heavy armor, he’s either a merc or a freelancer, and either way he’s armed to the teeth, whether he’s showing it or not.

She (the real Shepard, not the ghost) had teased him mercilessly about his light armor when he’d first joined her. He’d been disgruntled by it at first but conceded her point the first time a geth’s round tore straight through the armored weave like it was tissue paper, found a new set of medium armor waiting for him in his locker a few days later (maybe that’s when he was an eighth in love with her, or a fourth, he can’t remember. It’s hard to pinpoint the progression of the devotion he’d felt for the commander, harder to forget the grin she hadn’t even tried to hide when she saw him wear the medium armor for the first time, her crowed words: “We’ll get you into heavy armor someday, Vakarian.”)

(She’d gotten her way, just like she always did. All it took for him to start wearing the heavy armor was her gruesome death and Garrus adding “vigilante” to his resume.)

“I didn’t, did I?” the hallucination says, trailing along at his heels. This is the third time he’s heard these words from her this month, and he’s not positive on how many times there were before this, but certainly enough that he can mimic her perfectly. The real Shepard never told him about Earth before her death and her specter doesn’t either, no matter how hard she tries. She starts to, asks him if she’s ever said it, and then changes the subject.

“This is a bad idea, Garrus,” she says sternly, and if he wasn’t so good at ignoring her by now he might’ve turned and informed the ghost that Shepard rarely called him Garrus, it was almost always Vakarian, professional and distanced, just like with everyone else (but that didn’t keep Alenko from kissing her, some part of him says. She left Alenko to die, a different part of him argues. But that wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t have prevented that.)

The ghost tries her hardest to be Shepard, to drown Omega in her words, the water endlessly pouring from her opened mouth, but she’s not Shepard, she’s a pale imitation that he conjured from the depths of his grief-stricken mind some months ago, and for some reason she never left, not even after he ended up with twelve other ghosts dogging his heels--but they’re not ghosts, not really, they’re his team, and they’ve gifted him the strangely hilarious name of Archangel.

He’s not an archangel. If anyone had been it was Shepard, all teeth and fiery wrath and battle contrasted with mercy and empathy and hope, but Shepard’s dead and gone and he’s taking her place as best he can, so he makes no argument against the name and the moniker sticks.

“He’s betrayed you, you know,” the ghost says almost nonchalantly and he’s so used to pretending it doesn’t exist that he almost misses the words, new and unsaid before. He turns to her and sees the sentence hang like ice from her lips, fall and shatter on the ground.

“What?” he asks, voice monotone. Anyone else on the street (in the meetingplace, he thinks) pretends they don’t see or hear him, move to the other side of the walkway and quicken their pace, ignoring the heavily armored turian talking to thin air.

“He’s betrayed you. And you should kill him.” It’s not Shepard’s voice coming from specter anymore but he can’t pinpoint whose it is. He turns on his heel, heads back to the safehouse, doesn’t realize that the ghost isn’t following him until its voice (not her voice, it’s not her voice, and maybe it never was) distantly calls out, “It’s too late, Garrus.”

 

He went over the recommended stim usage almost five days ago and everything feels wrong, but it’s not because he hasn’t slept in days or because he’s gulped down only the bare minimum of nutrient paste needed to keep his arms moving, his talons shoving heat sinks into his rifle as he picks the mercs off one by one. It’s almost like the target practice he did with his father, back when he was a kid. They’re easy to shoot and some of them don’t even wear helmets, too youthful and cocky and convinced of their own immortality.

No, it feels wrong because he’s spent almost two years with the ghost, and she’s gone now, left behind at that place where Sidonis was supposed to meet him, but Sidonis lied to him (and there are too many good men dead because of that. It’s not a grief he’ll forgive--he’s not Shepard and Sidonis is not Saleon.) It’s almost funny to him when considers it; he spent only a few months with the real Shepard, spent longer with the hallucination of her that his mind created for him.

He’s on dry land for the first time since the human woman first stepped foot on the presidium and took off her helmet, greeted him with a short nod and a clipped remark about Saren. He drowned in Shepard, bathed in her words, and the hallucination attempted to mimic that, but her imagined words were like a sprinkle of light rain compared to the howling gale Shepard conjured.

He without either version now and he can’t quite remember how he functioned without her, or even without the pale imitation of her, in his life, but the stims and the repetition of scope, shoot, reload, scope, shoot, reload keeps him from overthinking.

Garrus falters when he sees the wide shoulders and flattened breastplate of a shiny suit of heavy armor, but it’s just another merc, it’s always just another merc. That style of armor became quite popular after Shepard’s death, the armor that the first human spectre used to wear. It went out of style shortly after she was posthumously disgraced by the council but many mercenaries and freelancers still wore it because it was sold cheaply and was just as protective as any other suit of armor.

He peers down his scope, lines up a headshot, and his stomach leaps into his throat. He fumbles and nearly drops his gun but manages to shoot off a concussive round.

He’s convinced it’ll go right through his target.

It doesn’t, it bounces off of that flat breastplate, and his target glances up at him irritably.

She’s not wearing a helmet and he can see her features clearly, her strong jaw and heavy brows and straight nose. Alenko called it an empress’s nose, once, and it had made her laugh. And while Garrus knows little about humans and even less about human empresses, he thinks has to agree with the deceased lieutenant’s words--if there was every a person who could head an empire, lead them to greatness, it would be her.

Shepard.

She turns her head and he knows she’s not an illusion because there’s a thin filigree of orange light tracing up her cheek, like she was made of porcelain and someone hit her too hard and she cracked, letting the light inside of her bleed out. He knows it’s her when she slams a fresh heat sink into her shotgun, motions to two squadmates he doesn’t recognize, and almost crackles with the blue heat of biotic energy and charges, takes out one, two of the freelancers hunting him with the ease of a well-trained soldier.

She’s up the stairs in minutes, squadmates at her back, gestures towards him with her chin. “Archangel?” she asks, and it’s her voice, blessedly calm and measured. It washes over him like a breath of fresh air and he’s distinctly aware of just how different it is from the the ghost’s voice.

He holds up a finger to pause her, scopes, lines up with his next target, and shoots.

He uses his rifle like a crutch to help him to his feet, almost wobbles over to a nearby crate and takes a seat. He blames it on the stims, takes a moment to breathe deeply and collect himself before removing his helmet.

“Shepard,” he greets, as evenly as he can. “I thought you were dead.”

Shepard breaks into a smile and it might be the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, grin wide and crooked. “Garrus,” she says, voice breaking.

His name sounds right coming from her lips, like it was wrong every other time someone’s mouth shaped it, like she was polishing away the title of Archangel, the role that he’d failed. He flares his mandibles in a turian grin and waits for her words to pull him back under her spell, waits to drown in her.

“Garrus,” Shepard says again, and she moves forward like she’s going to embrace him, arms wide before falling to her sides. Her mouth opens and closes like a gasping fish, like she can’t find any other words, and she’s silent. Her spell doesn’t come and he doesn’t drown and he’s bewildered.

He reaches out one tentative hand and lays it on her shoulder. She practically leans into the touch, soaking up reassurance and comfort from his gauntleted hand. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath and says his name once more, “Garrus,” like it’s a prayer.

She opens her eyes and she’s herself again, the Shepard he knows, the commander he followed to hell and back. “What’re you doing here?” she asks and her voice is free of any of the influence and charm that pulled him under before.

She’s back and she’s alive and he’s spent two years without her, two years under the constant drizzle of an imposter’s words. He’s a hundred percent in love with her and planted on dry land for the first time since she set foot on the presidium and she doesn’t even attempt to pull him under.

He’s already hers and she trusts him implicitly.

 

 


End file.
